Meanwhile, no one else testified to having even seen a taxi cab in that location except for Cynthia White, who claimed, improbably, to have been standing on the sidewalk at the corner near where the cab would have been, watching the shooting (no witness placed White at the scene). Furthermore, although there are myriad photographs taken of the crime scene by police and by freelance press photographers -- some snapped from a very early point in the investigation while it is still dark -- there is not one photograph showing Chobert's taxi cab parked behind Faulkner's squad car, where he testified he was parked.
It is very unlikely that Chobert did actually park his car there. Why? Because, unknown to the jury, Chobert at the time of that incident was driving his taxi on a license that had been suspended for a DWI conviction. Even the prosecutor knew that was a big deal, and alerted the court, but the judge, Albert Sabo, a former Sheriff and well known to be a friend or the prosecution, ruled that the information was not germaine to Chobert's veracity as a witness and kept the information out of court). Moreover, also not known to the jury (because, once again, the trial judge ruled that it was irrelevant to his credibility), Chobert was currently on probation on a five-year sentence for conviction of arson for hire (he had tossed a molotov cocktail bomb into a grammar school for pay). Does anyone honestly believe that such a person, on probation and driving illegally, would have deliberately pulled up his taxi and parked behind a police car?
Because Chobert's crimes were withheld from the jury, the prosecutor in his closing argument was able to actually say to the jury:
"...The kernel of his believability, the trust that you can have in an individual when he talks as he did I would not criticize that man one bit. Ladies and gentlemen, he knows what he saw and I don't care what you say or what anybody says, that is what he saw. Do you think anybody could get him to say anything that wasn't the truth?"
Would that have gone over like it clearly did, had the jury been informed, as it should have been, of Chobert's crimes, and the pressure he must have been under to be a "good" prosecution witness? We cannot know, because the prosecutor was allowed to get away with the deception, thanks to a criminally biased judge.
The prosecutor in the case was also guilty of misconduct -- because it became known later that Chobert had asked him, before testifying at the trial, if the prosecutor could "fix" his suspended license. Even if the prosecutor never did "fix" that license suspension, the mere fact that the witness thought that it might be possible in return for supportive testimony should have been brought to the attention of judge and jury. Prosecutor Joseph McGill never mentioned that request to the defense or the judge, nor was he challenged about it years later, after Chobert testified about it at a 1995 post-conviction hearing (held before the same trial judge, Albert Sabo).
Furthermore, in two drawings of the scene of the crime -- one apparently in White's own hand, and a second professionally done by police investigators in accordance with her direction (both published as illustrations in my book on the case, Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003) -- she does not depict Chobert's taxi, though she does draw and mention a Ford Sedan that was not at all involved in the incident, and which was parked in front of the VW, and is evident in police photos of the scene.
As for White herself, many have also questioned whether a prostitute with many arrests and who was well known to police would have been standing on the sidewalk near a parked police car at all, much less when gunfire erupted. Even if she had been hanging out there initially, it is most likely she would have departed the scene immediately as Faulkner pulled his car to the curb. In any event, her story changed multiple times as, over the course of months during investigations before the trial, she was repeatedly picked up by police on prostitution charges and then brought in to the homicide division to be questioned and requestioned. Each time, her "recollection" of the incident changed, always moving closer and closer to the scenario that the prosecution ultimately presented to the jury.
Initially White was not even treated by police investigators as an important witness. Other witnesses at the scene were immediately brought over to the police van where a seriously injured and internally bleeding Abu-Jamal was being left untended for half an hour, and asked if they could identify him. She never was. Later, the prosecution assured an arraignment judge that she would not be an "identification" witness, though at trial, six months later, she was asked to point Ab-Jamal out in the courtroom as though she would know him from the incident (his face had been in the papers and on the news for months preceding the trial by that time, making that courtroom ID process a farce).
Finally, Sen. Toomey in his Senate speech, makes much of the claim -- made at the trial with great fanfare -- that Abu-Jamal had "bragged" about having shot Faulkner and that he said he "hoped the MF-er would die," as he was brought into the same hospital himself by police for treatment of a bullet wound to the chest.
What Toomey didn't say was the reality that this supposedly "shouted out" confession was reported to police investigators by nobody, including none of the officers who dragged him into the hospital ER (beating him along the way), either that day, or in subsequent days or weeks. Nor was it heard by the doctors who were only feet away working on Faulkner. Only two months later, at a meeting of police and prosecutor, did several officers claim they suddenly "remembered" the confession. (The other person said to have heard the "confession" was a hospital security guard, but she didn't mention it to police either at the time -- only months later.)
Most significantly, the police officer assigned to guard Abu-Jamal during his time in the ER and in his hospital room following surgery, Gary Wakshul, wrote in his official report on that day that during the course of all his time with Abu-Jamal, which began with the suspect's arrival at the hospital, "the negro male made no comments."
Near the end of Abu-Jamal's trial, the defense tried to have Wakshul brought in and put on the stand to explain the contradiction between his signed statement that there had been "no comments" from his charge and the belated claim by other police and the hospital guard that Abu-Jamal had shouted out a confession. But the prosecution claimed he was away "on vacation," and the judge, saying he was unwilling to delay the trial, sent the case to the jury for deliberation with the damaging "confession" testimony left unchallenged. It turns out that Wakshul was actually at home waiting to be called to testify, and that the prosecutor had simply lied to the court. We know this because Wakshul later said he had been "ordered" to say home and to be on call during his vacation until the trial had ended. That instruction would, of course, have come from the District Attorney's office, and almost certainly from prosecutor McGill himself.
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